Of course, baseball is a game of expectations.
In the game of expectations, Ciudadanos fell short.
But the campaign is playing a game of expectations, and aides have long insisted that Mr. Romney does not need to win Iowa to do well.
But soccer is a game of expectations as well as goals, and while neither team scored and Algeria has yet to score at all in South Africa, the Algerians were in a celebratory postmatch mood.
What is really happening is that the gossips who want Mr Hague to remain party leader are playing a game of expectations-management against the gossips who want to replace him.
David Plouffe, a senior White House adviser, playing the time-honored game of expectations-setting, said that Mr. Romney might have spent more time preparing for the series of debates starting Wednesday than anyone ever, and that "challengers tend to do really well in debates".
And since politics is a game of expectations, that may be enough.
He knew how much this middle-class audience of concert-goers – among the first properly public, as opposed to aristocratic, audiences for symphonic music in history – understood and appreciated his invention, his games of expectation and surprise, his effortless manipulation of genre, affect, and expressivity.
In an odd game of managing expectations, Beijing's allies here are now predicting that democrats will capture a majority of the legislature for the first time in the September election, while the democrats are predicting that they will not.
In recent days, Mr. McCall had played the game of dampening expectations, even calling himself the underdog on Monday, to make his anticipated primary victory seem that much bigger.
